Galleria Continua Les Moulins celebrates two decades with Les 20 Ans des Moulins

Galleria Continua marks ‘20 Years of Boldness and Friendships’ of its Les Moulins space in France with Les 20 Ans des Moulins, a group exhibition bringing together more than 50 contemporary artists and collaborators, on view from May 31 – December 20, 2026. “Each participant was invited to reflect on an artist as well as on a personal experience of the place. Artists, collectors, visitors from afar, writers, journalists, families and long-standing partners all contribute to this collective narrative. Through their commitment, their loyalty, and at times simply their presence, they have helped define the essence of Les Moulins, not merely as a gallery, but as a place in its own right, with its own geography and a singular way of engaging with existence,” Galleria Continua notes in the show's official release.

Across the space, historic and newly commissioned works facilitate dialogue between art, architecture and the surrounding landscape. Among the highlights are Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Labirinto e Grande Pozzo and Spazio Libero, Sislej Xhafa’s Silvio, Zhanna Kadyrova’s Invisible Forms and Leandro Erlich’s VR Pool. Together, the works move between sculpture, installation, technology and illusion, continually asking visitors to reconsider how they see and inhabit a space.

Pistoletto’s Labirinto e Grande Pozzo turns the act of moving through the art exhibition into a psychological journey. “At the centre of the experience lies the mirror, a surface of confrontation with oneself where fear and safety, loss and rediscovery coexist. The well is not an ending but the reflection of an inner landscape. Made from a simple and everyday material, the work unfolds as a symbolic journey, a passage through darkness toward knowledge,” the art gallery notes.

Xhafa’s Silvio, meanwhile, uses a big scale and the visual language of the classical bust statues to question the apparent permanence of political power. “Rising to a height of around five metres, Silvio (2010) draws inspiration from Silvio Berlusconi, a major figure in contemporary Italian political life…The work is fragile, unstable and destined to erode. Oscillating between monumentality and irony, it reveals the illusory nature of power, the theatrical dimension of politics, and the cult of personality, all of which conceal a deeply vulnerable reality,” the contemporary art gallery explains.

Elsewhere, Erlich’s VR Pool blends physical and virtual environment, turning illusion into a critical tool. With only a metal ladder physically occupying the space, visitors enter a simulated swimming pool through a VR headset, finding themselves in an immersive environment that is both recognisable and fundamentally impossible. While, Kadyrova’s Invisible Forms makes the unseen tangible, translating beams of light from everyday technologies into dense cement structures that evoke illumination and surveillance.

Another highlight is Daniel Buren’s Comme un jeu d’enfant, work in situ (2014 – 2026). Originally conceived in 2014 and subsequently presented internationally, the installation has been reconfigured for Les Moulins as a vast, walk-through landscape of geometric wooden forms. Cubes, cylinders, arches, pyramids and parallelepipeds are enlarged to human scale. Divided between vivid colour and white, the installation changes continually as visitors move through it. Passages and shifting viewpoints create a work that cannot be understood from a single vantage point. Instead, it unfolds through movement, turning the visitor into an active participant.